Opening Reception: Sergio Prego, Gabriel Martinez

Left: Sergio Prego, “High-Rise” (2016). Right: Gabriel Martinez, “Untitled” (2017).

The Blaffer Art Museum at the Kathrine G. McGovern of Arts, University of Houston, is proud to present the first major institutional exhibitions by Sergio Prego and Gabriel Martinez. Prego’s “Rose-colored Drift/To the Students” and Martinez’s “Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely” kick off with an opening reception on Friday, Oct. 27, 6-9 p.m. and will be on view through Jan. 27, 2018.

About the Artists

The New York-based artist Sergio Prego creates unfamiliar perceptual and spatial situations in order to examine contemporary realms of experience. Prego takes inspiration from the performative or experiential turn of the 1960s — that is, the idea that meaning is made of and stems from the viewer’s embodied experience. His sculptural devices specifically created for the galleries, including inflatable structures, transform the pre-existing spatial and discursive context of the art institution so as to shape experiences beyond our conventional matrix of attitudes, habits and beliefs. “Rose-colored Drift/To the Students” is his first US museum exhibition in a decade and consists of sculptures, works on paper and videos. For more information, visit http://blafferartmuseum.org/sergio-prego-rose-colored-driftto-the-students/.
The Houston-based Chicano artist, educator and performer Gabriel Martinez digs into the relationship between art, public space and collective memory in order to uncover lost social histories. Over the last 15 years, Martinez has established a set of ongoing gestures based on his interactions with American cities, including urban guerrilla interventions, gathering and repurposing street debris and re-appropriations of public semiotic codes. Martinez understands the relationship between art and public spaces not from the standpoint of an integration with architecture and the landscape, but in a more radical if precarious, civic sense of art in the public interest. Wandering through the narrow shoulders of car-centric cities, Martinez operates as a gleaner in a wasteland, rummaging through glass, dust, trash and signage. “Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely” is the first museum solo show by Martinez. The exhibition presents a series of ongoing projects as well as new commissioned work. For more information, visit http://blafferartmuseum.org/gabriel-martinez-everything-turns-away-quite....

The exhibitions are curated by Javier Sanchez Martinez, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at Blaffer Art Museum.